Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, peers through the jaws of a 4-year old Great White Shark in Long Beach, California, on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, peers through the jaws of a 4-year old Great White Shark in Long Beach, California, on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Chris Lowe shows off a small acoustic transmitter that is attached to a shark and sends signals to buoys in Long Beach, California, on Monday, June 26, 2017. Lowe is the director of Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Sound

The gallery will resume inseconds

A collection of transmitters used by Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab include acoustic transmitters, left, satellite tags, center, and a new device, right, that attaches to the shark’s dorsal fin and records every motion, water temp, heading, and a video camera. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, shows off a horn shark on campus in Long Beach, California, on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

A new transmitter used by Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab is like a Fitbit for Sharks. It attaches to the shark’s dorsal fin and records every motion the shark makes, water temp, depth, heading, and a video camera. It also has a transmitter that allows researchers to follow the shark. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Chris Lowe shows off a small acoustic transmitter that is attached to a shark and sends signals to buoys in Long Beach, California, on Monday, June 26, 2017. Lowe is the director of Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Some of the transmitters used by Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab include small acoustic transmitters that ping buoy receivers when a shark swim by. Chris Low, director of the Shark Lab, likened it to cars driving past a Fastrak toll booth. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, shows off a horn shark on campus in Long Beach, California, on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, by some of his holding tanks on campus in Long Beach, California, on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Some of the transmitters used by Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab include acoustic satellite tags that attach to a shark for a predetermined time, then release themselves, float to the surface, then start transmitting to a satellite. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Some of the transmitters used by Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab include a spot tag that attaches to the shark and transmits a signal every time the shark surfaces. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Lifeguards and researchers search for sharks to tag in the water off North Beach in San Clemente, California, on Wednesday, May 24, 2017. Cal State Long Beach grad student Emily Meese watches on from the bow of the rescue boat as fellow grad student Ryan Logan rides on the back of the Jet Ski. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Lifeguards and researchers search for sharks to tag in the water off North Beach in San Clemente, California, on Wednesday, May 24, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Chris Lowe, who runs the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, rides on the back of the Jet Ski driven by Jason Young, chief of OC Lifeguards, as they search for sharks to tag in the water off North Beach in San Clemente, California, on Wednesday, May 24, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Chris Lowe has had a life-long fascination with sharks, ever since he snagged a dogfish shark as a kid and rushed to the library to find out what it was. And through a 30-year-career as a marine biologist, he’s studied tiger sharks, hammerheads, blue sharks, reef sharks, you name it.

Just not, you know….

“I swore I would never work on white sharks,” Lowe said in his office, the Shark Lab Cal State Long Beach, over the hum of the pumps that drive the tanks where small sharks and other species swim. “They get way too much credit; that’s all the public ever thinks about when you say ‘shark.’ Why would I want to be involved with that when there are so many other cool sharks?”

But then, Lowe was reeled in, caught in a frenzy over great whites as newborns were found in unusually large numbers just off the Southern California coast. A great white shark tagging program that started at the Shark Lab more than a decade ago propelled him to become the public expert on local great whites. And with the influx of local great whites gaining worldwide attention, Lowe is one of the few scientists you know by name.

“I think the thing that lured me in was working with the babies,” he said.

“They are actually kind of cute.”

Fit bit for sharks

Lowe grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, a 4th generation descendant of whalers and commercial fishermen.

“I never remember not knowing how to swim,” he said.

He was just getting curious about the marine world, age 8 or 9, when he caught the dogfish.

“That kind of got me started in trying to figure out why animals do what they do,” he said. “I’d get in trouble all the time, putting animals in my pockets to take home; all sorts of things, crabs, snails.”

Some survived the journey. Others, he said, “not so much.”

He earned a marine biology degree from a small college in Rhode Island. After graduation he met Don Nelson, a researcher who was using acoustic telemetry to track crabs.

“They would be out there all night, I’d go out and just watch,” Lowe said. “Once I got to talking to Don, I realized he was a famous shark researcher.”

Nelson talked him into applying to the graduate program in Long Beach, to the research center that students and teachers casually at the time dubbed the “Shark Lab.” Mostly, they were studying Angel sharks, horn sharks and blue sharks, all the sharks most common 30 years ago.

From 1988 through 1991, he studied under Nelson, a diver and spear-fisherman revered as one of the world’s most renowned experts on shark behavior. Decades earlier, in the late 60s, the military had declassified acoustic telemetry and scientists like Nelson had made careers out of using it for research.

“You’d have to build your own transmitter to put on a shark. The goal was to say ‘where do these animals go’?” Lowe said, referring to it as “spy technology.”

Then, they started integrating sensors in the technology. That told them how deep sharks dived and what water temperatures they preferred. Researchers in a boat could track the animals in a simple way — the beeping would be louder when the sharks were close and it would fade when the shark veered away.

“It was exhausting,” Lowe said. “You would have to follow the animal continuously for 24 or 48 hours.”

He went to Hawaii to get his PhD and started a project to study hammerheads off Kaneohe Bay. In that effort, Lowe and a team created a tunnel in which the sharks would swim in place, essentially creating a fit-bit for sharks.

“Basically, I made a transmitter and every time the shark’s tail would wag, it would create a pulse,” he said. “By putting the shark in the chamber, I could count how many tail beats it was making while it was swimming at a certain speed. If you know how much oxygen an animal consumes, you can calculate how many calories it uses.”

As he was getting ready to graduate, in 1997, he got word that his mentor, Nelson, died of skin cancer. Lowe applied for the position to be director of Shark Lab 30 years after he’d been a student there.

“I had an opportunity to keep the Shark Lab legacy going,” he said. “I remembered… how it helped me. And I wanted to see it continue.”

Taggers

In the early 2000s, Monterey Bay Aquarium wanted to do some studies on white sharks, with an end goal of trying to keep one in captivity. All other attempts around the globe had failed; great whites died within days of capture.

The Monterey Bay experts sought out Lowe and his grad students to find out more about the sharks: What are their favorite waters? How much depth do they need? Can they be kept safely in an exhibit?

Lowe and his students scoured fishing records, sifted through Fish and Game data, hit the museums. “We dove through every record we could find,” he said.

They found that most great white interactions with humans involved the gill net fisheries. So to start their tagging program, to learn more about great white behavior, they teamed up with the fishermen.

“The only way we knew how to get (great whites) were when the commercial fishermen accidentally caught one,” Lowe said. “They’d call us, we would race to the dock, and we’d have this baby white sharks they had in their nets.

Lowe and his people would measure the animal, take samples of tissue and blood, and then put a equip the creature with a transmitter. Then, Lowe said, “we’d take it out and let it go.”

They learned much about the great whites during those studies, including this: If a great white was released within 24 hours of being trapped in a net, its chances of survival was 94 percent.

“In all my years, I don’t think I’ve seen a shark that is as resilient as these little white sharks,” he said.

The Monterey aquarium was able to keep a great white in captivity for 198 days in 2005, longer than any other research facility in the past. More than a million visitors saw the shark up close.

But then the shark started feasting on the other sea creatures in the tank and become too big to handle, so it was released back into the wild.

Close to shore

The great white sharks that in recent years have taken to hanging around Southern California’s shore line – from Ventura, through Santa Monica and the South Bay, and down to San Onofre – are a researcher’s dream.

Sprawled in front of Lowe on a recent day are the tools he uses to learn more about this mysterious creature; acoustic transmitters, receivers (about 120 or so span the coast), tags that transmit data to satellites.

The questions now are specific: Why are they staying in Southern California longer than they used to? Why so close to shore? Why so many? And why do they hang at one beach for 40 to 50 days straight before venturing on to the next hot spot?

The satellite transmitters help answer those questions, but there’s a problem: Money.

“It’s the most expensive cell phone bill you could ever imagine,” Lowe said of transmitters that ping satellites.

A single shark outfitted with a transmitter and appropriate tags can be swimming with $10,000 on his back. And maintaining the receivers along the coast costs about $60,000 a year.

Governments don’t pony up and grants dry up. His only option is lobbying for private funds – a new frontier for the scientist.

New research includes implanting sharks with transmitters that last 10 years, so scientists can learn more about how great whites spend their mysterious “tween” years.

“My students have to learn to be surgeons,” Lowe said.

There’s also a new smart tag created by one of his grad students, Connor White. It clamps to the shark’s dorsal fin and records its one-day journey. After 24 hours, it pops off and floats to the surface. The team uses radio transmission to find it in the vast ocean.

Recently, three sharks off Belmont were equipped with smart tags. They learned that two of the animals stayed in Belmont during the day and at night went into Long Beach Harbor. The third headed off shore.

As the grad students tracked the shark’s movement — passing the Huntington Beach pier, diving into a deep water canyon, then heading south to Dana Point — they couldn’t resist using a famous line from “Jaws” on Lowe:

“We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

Cooling the hype

Fact: You have a better chance of being killed while driving to the beach than you do of being killed by a shark in the ocean.

“Is a shark going to attack you? We know that’s not going to happen, but that’s not what the public thinks,” Lowe said.

A shark comeback in recent years (protections have boosted shark populations) is a positive thing, he said, a sign that laws and legislation are working to revive a healthy ecosystem.

“We sterilized our climates, we got rid of all predators because we simply viewed them as a threat or a risk,” he said. “Twenty years ago, we recognized the importance of those predators and we’ve done work to bring them back.

“(But) there are two generations of Americans that don’t know how to interact with those predators,” he added. “I would argue we have a lot of educating to do.”

Lowe this week released a shark safety video, something to help the public as shark encounters and shark-related beach advisories become more frequent. Beach goers should stay in a group; a crowded beach is the safest beach, Lowe explained in the video. If you see a shark, in most cases, it is just passing by. But if you are attacked, Lowe suggests hitting the shark in the eye or nose or sticking your hand in its gills.

In the past year, Lowe has has been asked about sharks by everyone from Smithsonian Magazine to National Geographic to the Washington Post.

He’ll also be featured on Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” on July 25, talking about what he thinks is an unknown adult great white population living closer than we know. For that event, the university is planning a preview screening and tours of the Shark Lab on July 21.

“My hypothesis is there’s another population we know nothing about that is using Southern California year round,” he said.

He jokes that he has a “love-hate relationship” with “Shark Week.”

“I think it’s good because it keeps people interested in sharks. It’s bad in that sometimes they go a little over the top and it’s hard to get people to not be afraid of sharks.”

This year, the major promo leading up to Shark Week is a race between Irvine Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps and a great white shark.

Laylan Connelly started as a journalist in 2002 after earning a degree in journalism from the University of Southern California. Through the years, she has covered several cities for The Orange County Register, starting as a beat reporter in Irvine before focusing on coastal cities such as Newport Beach, Dana Point and Laguna Beach. In 2007, she was selected for a prestigious Knight New Media fellowship focusing on digital media at UC Berkeley, where she learned skills to adapt to the ever-changing online landscape. Using a web-based approach, she turned her love for the ocean into a full-time gig as the paper’s beaches reporter. The unique beat allows her to delve into coastal culture by covering everything from the countless events dotting the 42 miles of coastline, to the business climate of the surf industry, to the fascinating wildlife that shows up on the shores. Most importantly, she takes pride in telling stories of the people who make the beaches so special, whether they are surfers using the ocean to heal, or the founders of major surf brands who helped spawn an entire culture, or people who tirelessly fight to keep the coast pristine and open for all to enjoy. She’s a world traveler who loves to explore the slopes during winter months or exotic surf spots around the globe. When she’s not working, or maybe while she's researching a story, you can find her longboarding at her favorite surf spots at San Onofre or Doheny.